Montreal Python

This Saturday, you have the opportunity of participating in the Python Bug Day. How would you like to be one of the contributors of Python? If you have ideas for improving parts of the official documentation, the standard library, the language itself, or if you have a patch waiting for a review that you would like to see committed, or if you just want to come and fix an existing bug, it’s your day!

Join us for an effort at closing some Python bugs and feature requests. Get quick feedback on your patches and bugfixes, learn how to submit and examine patches, and have fun chatting with the Python developers and other contributors. You don’t need to know the CPython codebase or process to join, just Python programming knowledge.

If you live in Montreal, come at Caravan to meet fellow hackers and take part in a physical sprint! The address is 5334 de Gaspé; we’ll be there from 10:00 to 18:00.

Please register at http://mpbugday.eventbrite.ca/ to let us know how many people to expect. People from around the world are welcome to join the #python-dev IRC channel to participate in the bug day.

This page contains all the information you need to get set up, see the list of bugs or learn about IRC: http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonBugDay
If you need any help beforehand, feel free to ask on core-mentorship mailing-list

Thanks to Caravan for sponsoring us!

The second event in our series of Distutils2 sprints was again a success. We’ve managed to fix some interesting issues and we’ve gained some experience points at dealing with the black magic of the packaging arcane.

We would like to thank TP1 for hosting the sprint at their nice Downtown Montreal offices and also for the pizza. Pierre Paul, our host, wrote a longer post relating the event.

Stay tuned for upcoming announcements on Distutils2 sprints.

Special thanks to the sprinters:

• Julien Courteau
• Jonathan Fernandes
• Patrice Gauthier
• Mathieu Leduc-Hamel
• Pierre Paul Lefebvre
• Alex Parij
• Kim Pettersen

Stay tuned this week for the announcement of the next sprint.

Here’s a glimpse of patches being born:

Divine inspiration:

The first Distutils2 sprint, held on the 21st of April at RadialPoint’s office, was a real success.

That afternoon marked the renewal of Montréal-Python’s contributions to this vital project of the Python ecosystem. Indeed, two years ago, sprints were organized here at the very beginning of Distutils2, which aims to replace Distutils with a more powerful tool that implements the new specs (PEPs) that all packaging tools will comply with in the long term.

We’re pleased that a dozen of volunteers were part of this first sprint!

I spent some time with every participant and I think everyone learnt something from the sprint, be it knowledge on packaging, a first experience in free software development or the writing test suites. I’d like to thank everyone who came and opened Pandora’s Box in order to fix bugs for the benefit of the whole community.

The complexity of the code explains the fact that only two patches were done at the end of the sprint, but the other patches started by the other participants could certainly be completed during the next one.

In order to keep the pace, a second sprint will be held Saturday the 12th of May. TP1 will host this sprint and provide us with some pizza. Keep in mind that our deadline is the release of the first beta version on the 24th of June. We have until that point to close bugs and implement some useful features still missing.

Contributing to Distutils2 will help the whole Python community. Be part of it!

Second Distutils2 Sprint:

• Date: Saturday, 12th of May 2012, from 12:00 to 19:00
• Place: TP1, 1410 Stanley street, office 500 (map)
• Registration is optional but recommended
• Setup instructions (can also be done on site)

Pythonistas,

Distutils2 is looking for love, and you are the group who are going to give it! The Montreal-Python user group is hosting, on the 21st of April, a sprint in Montreal to work on Distutils2 with Éric Araujo, Python core developer and distutils2 maintainer. Bring your laptop and your magic fingers, and we will provide the food and the good times. No previous knowledge of Distutils2 required, just general Python skills.

Distutils2 is the official successor of distutils. It aims to be a better, more flexible and more featureful packaging tool for Python authors, as well as a reusable library for packaging tools developers. Distutils2 is included in the Python 3.3 standard library under the name “packaging”, the module named “distutils2” is the standalone backport for Python versions 2.5 to 2.7, and 3.x. The first beta versions of Python 3.3 and Distutils2 are coming in June, and we are planning a series of sprints to make it ready for the release.

A sprint is simply programmers meeting together face-to-face to work on the same project. Previous sprints held in Montreal have improved Distutils2, why don’t you come along for the next one and put your mark on a Python release?

The good folks at Radialpoint have graciously provided us with space and free pizza. Come join us on Saturday, the 21st of April, from 12pm to 7pm.

The address is:
2050 Bleury Street
Suite 300

Registration here is preferable but not required.

For hacks and glory!

How does a developer change the world? One function at a time. This December the Notman House gives you a chance to join likeminded others and hack for a greater good.

The event is Random Hacks of Kindness and it will be hosted this December 3rd and 4th.

On the first day, Montreal participants will be presented real-life problems by representatives of Médecins Sans Frontières and the LIRNEasia think tank. Once a problem chosen, your team will then have two days to create a solution.

In this feat you will not be alone. Thousands of people world wide will be participating in 30 sister events along with you. Participants in other cities will work on solutions to the problems of their community or their organization.

Here in Montreal, I (Dimitry Zolotaryov) am looking for team-mates to represent Montreal-Python. Developers, designers, engineers and social media people are all welcome. Send me a message if you’re interested in being part of an enthusiastic team: dimitry@webit.ca.

This is your chance to hack for good. Won’t you accept the challenge?

Register Here: http://mtlrhok.eventbrite.com/?srnk=1
Event Page: http://www.rhok.org/event/montr%C3%A9al-canada

Past Problems: http://www.rhok.org/problems

We live in Montréal and we hack Python code; this is who we are. Right now, it just got event more exciting to be a hacker in this city. We hack code, but when our code interacts with cool data, the dance is a lot spicier. On Wednesday, the city of Montréal made us proud by releasing a lot of it’s data under a very permissive license. This is a first in the province of Québec.

Montréal-Ouvert has already been planing on hacking on Saturday November 19th.
Now that it has become exciting with real data, we want to make sure that there’s going to be a lot of Python code written there.

We don’t know yet where the hackothon will take place, but we trust that it’s going to be near downtown, somewhere within walking distance from a metro station. We will be there, and if you like to write Python code and plan on being there, write you name in the comments below; we’re going to assemble a corrosive Python strike team.

Here’s some ideas for cool projects we could undertake during this one day event:

• A site where people could suggest and vote on what dataset the city should release next. Think of something like Reddit or Ubuntu BrainStorm where someone could say “hey, I’d love to make a Patiner-Montreal clone for ski” or “let’s make homebrewing more fun by indexing the water hardness data by burough.”
• A cross-correlation of the datasets already published; can we use the demographics data to visualize how many firemen there are per resident in all of our burrows? How about policemen per resident? What if we bring an extra dimension, like average revenue per burough?
• An aggregator of existing and upcoming applications: a site where it’s easy to see what everyone is doing with the open data of Montréal and with all sorts of metadata like the GitHub repo and the contribution process. Voting on the best applications would make it event more fun.
• A flexible and intuitive calendar of the festivals and cultural events that makes is easy to browse by date, location and genre.
• An integration of all this new smoking hot data with Open Street Maps. Mapify all the things!

So, we’re going to be there. Who else is in?

We have found a location for our next packaging sprint (2011/01/29), it will be at LeSite’s office!
Here are the coordinates:
Le Site
381, Notre-Dame west, suite 200
Corner of McGill or St-Pierre
Metro Square Victoria

There will be beer -of course- and also coffee, food, beanbags, and even a giant TV with a PS3 if you want to take a small fifa break

The core Python packaging team is going to be sprinting on distutils2 from Thursday 2011-01-27 to Sunday 2011-01-30. We don’t want to be left behind so we plan to join them with a gathering on Saturday 2011-01-29.

We expect to be hacking between 11h AM and 8h PM. The location will be announced shortly but we expect an attendance cap between 12 and 20 hackers so don’t forget to RSVP on the wiki.

One of the great thing with a booming city like Montréal is that we get dynamic companies such as Google improving the synergy of our community by hosting our sprints in bigger rooms and providing food and refreshments.

Our next sprint will be on Django translation on September 22nd, 2010, starting at 18h30. Come and allow us to offer Django to a broader community of developers.

Only one week after that, we’ll host a sprint on the Python packaging system. Come and frantically hack with us to empower Python with the best packaging system out there.

Both sprints will be a Google, 1253 McGill College ave. suite #250.

Attendance is limited to 20 sprinters so don’t forget to RSVP on the wiki.

Last Thursday, we ran our 6th sprint on the Python packaging system. Most people worked on distutils2 and its test suite although a few were undertaking the implementation of new features in the 2to3 automated migration tool.

This sprint was a turning point in our sprint series because we managed to get enough notoriety to convince two sprinter to join us remotely despite a massive six hours timezone difference. Alexis Métaireau and Éric Araujo, both living in France and both Google summer of code students on the Python packaging system, joined us util the end of the sprint, around 7am in their timezone. Their participation was very helpful since they were able to answer many questions regarding the road-map and what was in the pipe for various sub-systems of the packaging eco-system. Since they both the commit privilege in the canonical repository, it was very motivating for everyone in Montréal to see their contributions being merged on the fly.

Congratulations to all the sprinter who resisted the call of the terraces to work on the Python packaging system:

• Éric Araujo (remote from France)
• Nicolas Cadou
• Alex Gal
• Yannick Gingras
• Alexis Métaireau (remote from France)
• George Peristerakis
• Luis Rojas

We will have more sprint in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for the announcements.